Bronze salmon seem to be a hot catch for vandals.
Oak Bay staff and art lovers hope for an epic scavenger hunt and not a needle in a haystack after one of two salmon stolen from a sculpture made its way back.
Salmon Cycle by south Island artist Trinita Waller once stood in the green space near the Bowker Creek walkway between Monterey and Hampshire avenues. Oak Bay bought the piece – depicting adult fish cycling upstream while small smolts swim downstream in the form of a tire – after it earned the most votes during the 2018 Arts Alive sculpture walk.
RELATED: Salmon Cycle is Oak Bay ArtsAlive’s winning sculpture
In September 2022, vandals took two of the three salmon.
Turns out, a second cast of the work was part of a Penticton sculpture walk a few years ago and suffered a similar fate in fall 2020, said Andrea Pass, acting arts and culture programmer for Oak Bay.
Both times the artist received an online tip. In the Okanagan, it was that the missing salmon was in a hotel room, where RCMP recovered the piece. In Oak Bay, it was simply a tip the work was vandalized.
Fearing more vandalism in the form of metal theft, staff squirrelled the sculpture away to the public works yard and started sorting out repairs.
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Unfortunately, recasting the sculpture is expensive and only possible if the original molds have been used a limited number of times.
But hopes rose earlier this month when the district got a message from Oak Bay High.
“We got this fantastic photo of ‘Do you recognize this salmon?’ and it’s a photo of the salmon,” Pass said. “The hope now is the other is out there waiting to be found.”
She hopes the other will magically show up, noting the kids were near Willows Beach when they found the large bronze salmon.
“It might be somewhere out in the community,” Pass said. “We’re just asking for people to look out for a large salmon balanced precariously on a pedal.”
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christine.vanreeuwyk@blackpress.ca
@van_reeuwyk
christine.vanreeuwyk@blackpress.ca
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